Thought For The Day - 3 April 2025

Long time readers will recall one of the memes of these missives: anarchy favors the rich. The Left Wing Lunatic Fringe has been frothing at the mouth over Mad Dictator Don's tariff regime. They can't or won't figure out the rationale of what, from a macro point of view, is full blown stupidity.

I can't bring myself to type the needed words to describe what he, or as likely, his staff of simpletons concocted

To determine how much higher those nations' rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each country's trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation.

It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate.

That is just idiocy.

Now, Mad Dictator Don claims to have a high-quality econ degree from The Wharton School. Well, he's about a third right. 1) he didn't go to Wharton, he got a hall pass through the back door after two years at Fordham, where he did go. 2) that degree he got wasn't a rigorous econ curriculum (I went through that at about the same time); it was not the MBA that Wharton has been famous for, for years, but just something called real estate economics as a BA. 3) at the time, that program accepted nearly anyone who could fog a mirror out of high school; they didn't want him.

Once again, with feeling: only a fucking moron thinks that the foreign entities, governments and businesses, send the US Treasury a check once a month or quarter to pay the tariff bill. It appears that Mad Dictator Don made up that shit decades ago, and he's sticking to it. Tariffs are a, very regressive, sales tax. Full stop. And will harm the sub-GED crowd, Mad Dictator Don's base, the most. Ya know, those folks who think 'experts' are out to get them, and who think that book larnin is a waste of time at best and evil most of the time. Measles? Just load up on vitamin A. Covid? Ivermectin.

Moreover, if the intent is some (as yet undescribed) plan to re-shore business in the Red Blooded USofA, by what law of modern economics will the average oligarch pay middle class wages for average assembly line drones????? The plain fact is that American oligarchs could have paid such wages decades ago, the Damn Gummint didn't prohibit them from doing so. The Damn Gummint (mostly the Right Wingnut version), throttled unions about that time, which lowered manufacturing wages, yet the oligarchs still shipped the jobs off-shore. Again: what's going to compel them to pay good wages now if they do re-shore? Case in point (read it up): Boeing's attempt to cut cost in South Carolina; pure disaster.

As many pundits, not just this author, have pointed out: the main beneficiaries of the fucked up tariffs will be those few oligarchs with on-shore production, who'll simply raise their prices to match the higher tariff-induced import prices. They're not so dumb as a sack of hair to leave all that moolah on the table. Will their worker drones see any of it? In a pig's eye.

What Mad Dictator Don just about guarantees is Trumpcession. Whether it's just a really bad Great Recession or full blown Depression isn't yet known. Once again, I remind gentle reader of Smoot-Hawley

The ultraprotectionist Smoot-Hawley Act is widely blamed for deepening and prolonging the worst chapter in U.S. economic history. In a 1993 debate with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot on Larry King Live, then VP and free-trade advocate Al Gore brought an antique picture of the two senators, mocking them for a disastrous policy prescription that "sounded reasonable at the time." Indeed, for the general public and a wide swath of trade experts, going the Smoot-Hawley route is the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

The oligarchs, mostly, kept partying in speakeays all the way through.